Why training a real estate ChatBot AI sucks!

What they don’t talk about when creating a Chatbot AI. Or what you might underestimate when you start creating your chatbots is the Natural Language Understanding and the detail required to train user-friendly conversation flows.

When I am speaking to people about our real estate AI chatbot, they are amazed. They get excited by the possibility of saving time and automating their lead qualification or lead nurturing campaigns.

But there is one thing they don’t see. It’s the same thing they will never have to experience. But yet our client’s benefit from this work hundreds of times a day. Or inside a conversation, their leads might have with our Chatbot AI.

This is, the invisible of running a chatbot business or what you might call the behind the scenes of building an AI with natural language understanding.

I have personally analyzed 1,000’s of conversations.

Think about that for a second. Imagine reading 1,000 text message conversations between other people (you don’t know) about buying, renting or selling a property.

Imagine reading these conversations to work out: what was said, how did they respond, why did they respond or why did they not respond? Along with hundreds of other data points like words used, time of conversation, the intent of conversation, the tonality of conversation and much more.

The first 25 are fun. Then you see the conversations in your spreadsheet. You realize you have just completed 25 of 3,752 conversation threads. This is the moment you reach for some extra caffeine to grind through it. At times you want to reach for wine but know this will not speed up the process.

As you grind through this data, you become aware of the hundreds of other challenges inside a conversation.

Like what about the thousands of different ways you can search for a property or reference the type of property you are looking for?

For example: first, you would need to know what type of property they are searching for and the differences. For example Villa, apartment, condo, flat, house, mobile home, house boat, shared room and the list goes on.

Then there is the structure of the sentence to indicate the important features or desired location. For example: SizeIntent/[Buy, Rent, Sell] [Amenities].

It required us to break down every conversation to its basic intent and structure. To train our AI to respond correctly when you ask it a question.

Why am I doing this?

Because I am committed to creating the smartest real estate AI on the planet. That means I need to understand the heart beat of any conversation to do with Real Estate. The good, the bad and the ugly.

It allows me to train our AI to handle the scheduling a property viewing or desired phone call appointment.

For example, I now understand the keyword triggers a person uses when they want to view a property. This is one of the first indicators of a buyers intent score. How we are scoring leads.

The lead would use words like this:

Like to View

Like to See

When can I see

When can I view

This is just a simple example, but these are just 4 of the thousands of keyword statements that have been trained into our helloAlex Real Estate AI.

This allows us to then automatically trigger the scheduling conversation to either book a time instantly, or find out when the lead is available to see the property to provide the real estate agent that availability information.

But this it not all. There is more. Much more!

What about scheduling a time?

Have you ever thought about how you schedule an appointment? What do you say? How many different ways can you ask to schedule an appointment? Think about it today when you ask a friend to coffee, lunch or dinner.

For example:

I’m available after 4 pm tomorrow

Call me at 9 am tomorrow

Call me next Tuesday afternoon

Text me before 10 am tomorrow.

Each of these statements has a different intention for scheduling the next point of contact. The type of communication channel could also be specified for example call, text, email, Skype, etc etc. This is something simple that a human understands but how do you train an AI to understand these concepts as well.

This means creating hundreds of variations of statements to train the system. This is also where you can leverage machine learning. However, at this point there is the need for human understanding.

It is also important to understand the context of the entire conversation as you might want to trigger a specific followup action. Like a postcard, email, ringless voicemail, appointment, phone call and the list goes on.

This is the time consuming and tedious parts of creating an AI. All the training. All the data entry. All the analyzing or extracting data from various reference points.

So when you are creating your ChatBot Ai you need to be aware of the size of the project.

But here is the kick in the gut. Even though I am training the system to handle the thousands of variations of these statements. There will still be statements I have missed or are new. There will be new slang or abbreviations created that needs to be handled.

Talking about slang. This was a fun few weeks of training the system to handle different slang. Text message conversation style in conjunction with property slang. For example, can you understand this?

Yes, that’s right. This is English text slang mixed with real estate slang. But then you also need to factor in the typo options to a statement like this and allowing for “fat fingers” effect.

That means the AI needs to learn from every real human interaction.

You need to ensure your chatbot AI has a self-learning or manual learning component. Where you can review each conversation and optimize the outcomes to improve.

This sounds fine at the time, but if you do not understand this from the beginning, you are missing a massive opportunity.

This is one of the challenges that the HelloAlex team has solved for Real Estate Agents who want a Chatbot. Our team has created and trained an AI 100% focused on the needs of real estate agents.

Our team trains and re-trains the AI every single day to make it smarter. The more conversations helloAlex has with real leads makes it smarter and better than the day before.

This takes commitment and persistence. This is the value we bring to real estate agents. Our focus on solving the lead engagement and customer follow-up challenges for real estate agents using chatbots and automation has allowed us to focus.

It allows us to create a better result for our clients. This means helping our real estate clients generate more commissions. It means converting more of their leads into sales which help them grow and expand their business.

Training a Chatbot AI is not for the faint of heart. But it is certainly a challenge that allows you to understand human communication at a new level.

If you want to know more about how helloAlex can help Real Estate agents convert more leads into commissions. Visit www.HelloAlex.io to find out more. If you want to schedule a demo, you can do that by using this link: Schedule Demo Here